Files, Feminism, and Flies: A Day at Interference Archive
Volunteers and Visitors navigate the personal and political materials in a treasure trove of social movements of decades past.
It was 12:06 p.m. The archive was supposed to open at 12:00 p.m., but due to an unforeseen F train total closure in downtown Manhattan, 12:06 p.m. would have to do. A woman bundled up beneath a quilted coat and knit scarf and hat patiently awaited the opening of the space at the door. Once the door was unlocked and open, the metal door cover bungeed to the metal window cover that was supposed to be opened but the key was lost somewhere among the copious stacks of zines and pamphlets.
The archive was quiet. Which would be typical for opening hours on a Saturday, but this silence almost felt penetrative and anticipatory — in a kind of odd, unsettling way. The silence seemed to linger for hours as the sole bundled visitor dug through possibly the most boring bins at the archive — buttons and file folders — fearing to cross the threshold to the back of the archive where the bulk of the archive — records, serials, posters, pamphlets, newspapers, the locally legendary screen printing bike — lies.
Interference Archive is a community archive in Park Slope — on the Gowanus border — that chronicles items replicated from social movements from the mid-1960s onward. Think records, protest posters, zines, buttons, etc. What is now the archive began as the personal collection of activist records and protest posters and independently published books from Brooklyn-based designer, artist, and archivist Josh MacPhee, amassed from years of involvement with social movements, the DIY and punk scenes, and various political projects throughout the years.
Recognizing the need to preserve the material, MacPhee, collaborated with friends to imagine a format where people could easily access the copious documents. They envisioned a space that functioned as a holding space for materials that could serve the dual function as a third space for members of the neighborhood and reflect their radical political views. An open-access archive and community center seemed like a good fit.
“Yeah, I do like the whole Open Stax thing. It’s a really cool way to like, handle our archives and stuff,” Ally Gartner, a fellow volunteer peaks up from her computer cutting through the previous silence to explain her reason for dedicating time to the archive.
Looking slightly disheveled from the night before, Ally explains that she dumped her girlfriend of nearly a year a mere 12 hours before — prompting the obvious question, why still come into the archive today? “I just needed to be out of the house,” Gartner explained. “Once you graduate,” the recent NYU graduate continued, “all the places you had to hang out for free inside disappear, and [the archive is] a really nice space to even just do work in.”
Given the open nature of the space, it attracts people of all endeavors and interests and experience levels. Occasionally you catch someone hyper-experienced doing something like tracking down a certain newspaper from a specific date range to track down and scan hundreds of pornographic sketches from a treasured radical cartoonist — true story. Sometimes it’s someone like Ally, who “just wanted to experience like with working with archives… [after taking] a lot of classes on different museum practices,” she noted when discussing why she began volunteering at the archive.
Most of the time, it’s a “just wanting to see what’s up with the place” attitude as one girl said after a brief “hello” and “welcome in” from Klea Kalia, who was staffing the general front section of the archive.
Visitors can spend as long as they desire to dig through boxes and scan or photograph the materials for their own personal use. Likely — well hopefully — someone at the archive knows something about the topic the visitor is trying to research because navigating the archive is a beast all on its own.
Volunteers vary in level of experience and commitment, but the horizontal structure of leadership allows for pretty much anyone to waltz in and claim their stake. “She’s only been here like 3 times,” seasoned volunteer Felix Jensen whispered cluing in the other volunteers about a new volunteer, as they closed out their volunteer shift for the day.
Things are only loosely organized — stacked in no particular order in a file box — and occasionally cataloged — since the archive began paying for an online logging system a few years ago. Anything before this vague time of transition lies in the void of the boxes waiting for the unlikely arrival of the total retrospective cataloging of the archive.
Surprisingly, Tara Martinez, a first-time visitor thought, “the small space made it not feel overwhelming and very easy to navigate.” This is likely because she turned to the half-size pamphlets right away which are the only type of material in the entire archive organized thematically instead of alphabetically.
Tara immediately reached for the LGBTQIA+ bin and pulled out the largest booklet in the box, which was entitled “Young, Gay, and Proud.” Within minutes of looking through it, she asked for help using the scanner because “it stuck out to me and made me laugh a little bit,” she noted. “The page I specifically scanned said, ‘How do you pick a lesbian from a straight girl? Gee, it’s certainly hard, I always end up picking the straight ones.’ And that kind of made me laugh.”
The archive allows people with no archival credentials or experience to avoid all of the red tape associated with institutional research — if you want to access a single document from a traditional archive even just for fun like Tara, you will likely have to send several emails and fill out multiple intended purpose forms just to have a shot at clearance — Interference Archive maintains an anti-institutional, anarchist format at its inception. How this translates to the everyday person is that anyone who walks through the door of the archive has access to anything in the archive — as long as you only take out one bin at a time.
After placing the LGBTQIA+ pamphlet bin away, Tara reached for the box of newspapers intriguingly labeled, Radical Therapy. She was immediately met with headlines of the likes of “Gay Love”, “Masturbation”, and “Female Pleasure” from the Berkeley-based publication from the early 1970s. “It was like a fun coincidence, and also a little opportunity to find out more about the activism from where I’m from,” Tara a Berkeley native noted. As she turned over the pages, Brooke Shuman, a seasoned volunteer and documentary journalist butted in, “I actually went to Pennsylvania to interview some of the writers of that magazine…it seems they were very anti-psychiatry.”
Brooke was stopping by the archive, outside of her scheduled shift time to explore some materials on international feminism for an upcoming exhibit at the archive. “It was cool to listen to her brainstorm about the theme for the exhibit,” Tara noted. Rather than sitting in silence and exclusivity, Brooke asked Tara, whom she had just met, several questions about her views on the relevancy of the topic.
Brooke is lucky to have acquired a certified cool archive volunteer position while the rest of us are left to greet, smile, and sort. Well, and now manage a fly infestation… “Someone killed 5 flies last week…like how do you even do that,” Klea noted as she flailed hoping to divert a swarm away from arriving visitors scraping in right before the space closed its doors for the weekend.
